In most cases those who were given the information considered themselves couriers bringing information to the public in a particular way mandated by the government or military source that had provided it to them.

The skeptical researchers on the outside, however, often considered the researcher putting out the explosive information to be nothing more than a target of government disinformation forces.

In many cases the messenger simply became painted as a villain inside the UFO community. Many volunteered the opinion it was fair game to shoot the new messenger who many others volunteered to shoot.

Bill Coleman, who was at the center of many of these planned leaks, told one of the target/couriers that the information had to be "leaked carefully, as a part of something else." Therefore, those picked as couriers and targets, were usually researchers who had just become prominent inside the UFO community, or film producers who could include the information as part of another project they might be working on.

Most researchers and film producers, provided information to disseminate to the public, appeared often to actually be serving both the role of target and courier at the same time. This was particularly true of people who came forward with documents they had been leaked.

Leaking through prominent film producers and ufologists would achieve numerous advantages,

The prominent researchers would have a wide audience of people listening to them. They are also the prime instruments for influencing the underlying beliefs within the UFO community.

By providing the key Ufology leaders with critical information wrapped in a bogus cover two important goals are accomplished. A) The researcher can be "put in their place" once the bogus information is exposed. This prevents any one researcher from becoming a totally respected source for the media. B) The idea that the intelligence people want in circulation still reaches the intended UFO or public target. (Some of the key ideas put out in bogus covers were MJ-12, the live alien, area 51, underground bases, and interaction between the government and the aliens) Not allowing any one researcher to become too listened to and credible appears to be a key part of the continuing cover-up.

Leaking as part of something else allows the dramatic information to be given as almost a sidelight to another story. One example is a concept put out by an intelligence agent codenamed "Falcon" that the aliens claimed to have been behind Jesus, as if he were simply a piece of their genetic experiment. This traumatic, potentially damaging information was hidden in a story of a captured live alien who wrote a book telling about alien life while listening to Tibetan music and eating strawberry ice cream. Most people picked up on the ice cream and missed the real message. The message got out in a way that people could take it or leave it. If they had put this out in a news conference by a government official, the results would not have been so nonchalant.

This method of leaking the details of the alien presence, without allowing an avalanche of uncontrollable disclosure to occur made many of those chosen as target/couriers to feel like they were helplessly running around in circles. Len Stringfield, chosen for many leaks over the many years he researched equated the experience to a squirrel running endlessly on a treadmill. He wrote

"Like so many other anecdotes in the past, it keeps me squirreling on the treadmill. Finding the proof to convince the world about UFO crash/retrievals may never come in my lifetime. But I believe that much of what I have said in my papers may come close to the truth if and when the time comes to tell it by official proclamation."

As mentioned above, the first modern day courier/targets were Robert Emenegger and Allan Sandler, who in 1972 received both a key document and an offer of decisive and explosive UFO/alien film footage for a documentary they had been asked to do for the Department of Defense.

This offer of a document and a film marked an important turning point in Ufology. Formally government public relations efforts involved debunking every aspect of the UFO phenomena.

Take for example, the release of a CBS documentary that was released in April 1966 coinciding with the open Congressional hearing that took place on April 5, 1966.

The documentary was nothing more than a "propaganda film" narrated by the ever-credible Walter Cronkite. The film piece relied heavily on government spokesman who appeared not to tell bizarre stories, which would confirm the phenomena real and very unusual, but denials and outright lies stating there was nothing to the UFO phenomena.

The CBS documentary called "UFOs: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy" was symbolic of most of the pre- 1972 documentaries that involved government participation. It claimed the Air Force had never tracked UFOs on radar, that the Air Force was being completely open and honest about the phenomena, and that tracking cameras had never filmed UFOs.

In 1972 the USAF, for whatever reason, took on a new course of action.